George W Bush's eighth and last
state-of-the-union address on 28 January 2008 was mainly concerned with the
economy and other domestic issues, but he still devoted nearly a quarter of the
speech to the Iraq war and its part in the United
States's wider war on terror. The upbeat theme was that the military surge
strategy now almost a year old was succeeding, to the extent even of offering
the tantalising prospect of a victory in Iraq.

Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at
Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001The president's message echoes and reinforces
a narrative about military trends in Iraq that has become deeply embedded in
the neo-conservative media in particular (see, for example, Fred Barnes "Bush's Priorities: Iraq Dominates the State of the Union", Weekly
Standard, 29 January 2008). Indeed, the redrawing of the Iraqi "story"
through the second half of 2007 - aided both a decline in the number of
American casualties and the increasing coverage of domestic matters (not least
the 2008 presidential election race) in the national media - has been a singular
feature of this period. But if what is happening in Iraq has been to a great
extent sidelined in the US media and political argument, the country's military
situation and political problems still hold the capacity to upset the US's
calculations (see Charles Tripp, "Iraq: the politics of the local", 25 January 2008).

It is important, then, to assess what is
really happening on the ground in Iraq; and to ask whether there are
indications that the positive effects of the surge for the United States may
already be beginning to recede.

The costs
of progress

The most recent events in Iraq reflect three
serious trends.

The first is an increase in suicide-bombing
incidents. In Mosul on 23 January, a blast in an apartment block killed thirty-six
people and wounded seventy; the US authorities blamed the attack on al-Qaida. A
day later, the police commander for the Mosul region, Brigadier-General Salih
Mohammed Hasan, was killed along with two other police officers by a
suicide-bomber as he visited the site of the explosion. In addition, many
other forms of routine violence continue; in Baghdad itself on 31 January, for
example, a bomb left in a parked car in the Shi'a
district of Kadhimiya killed at least three people and wounded five.

The second is a rise in American casualties after a relatively calm December 2007. The twenty-three soldiers
killed in December was the lowest number since February 2004, but the total
rose again in January to thirty-seven. A roadside-bomb explosion and
accompanying ambush in Mosul on 28 January killed five United
States troops.

In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security
monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here

Paul Rogers's most recent book is Why We're Losing
the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) - an
analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 and why a new security
paradigm is needed

The third trend is a concerted effort by
insurgents to target Sunni militia
leaders cooperating with the US military. The insurgents have engaged in a
campaign of systematic targeting of the Sunni
"awakening council" that has been cooperating with US forces, and
singled its leaders out for assassination (see Solomon Moore & Richard A
Oppel Jr, "Attacks imperil U.S.-backed militias in Iraq", International Herald
Tribune, 24 January 2008). At least a hundred people (most of them members
of the council) were killed in the period of late December and early January;
the core area affected is around Baghdad and Baquba, but it also extends to
Anbar province where US military leaders had claimed particular success in getting Sunni militias to oppose al-Qaida elements.

In response, there has been a further
intensification of the US's use of airpower to
target insurgent units and districts; in one ten-day period in January, fifty
tons of bombs were dropped in an insurgent-held area near Baghdad. This
tactic, as in Afghanistan, carries the constant possibility of creating new
enemies even as it destroys old.

The continuing military challenge has led the
Bush administration to make a further request for substantial additional
expenditure to fund the war. Congress will be asked on 4 February 2008 to
consider a $70 billion request to meet war costs (Afghanistan as well as
Iraq) in the first four months of the 2009 fiscal year; this is in addition to
the $196 billion sought for the current financial year.

This demand for even greater financial
expenditure coincides with a sudden and notable reduction in talk of troop
withdrawals from Iraq (see Philadelphia
Enquirer, 30 January 2008). The Bush administration had highlighted the
short-term (or at least time-limited) nature of the surge strategy; it promoted
the belief that several combat brigades would be withdrawn from Iraq in the
first half of 2008, thus reinforcing the impression of military progress. Such a reduction in troop numbers would
coincide with the vital closing months of the presidential campaign, in a way
that might be assumed to benefit the Republican candidate (even more, perhaps,
if it proves to be the pro-war, pro-surge if Bush adversary, John McCain). At this stage, however, the prospect of any
big pre-election drawdown from Iraq seems remote.

In any case, the US's calculations are not
completely in its own hands. There is a possibility that the six-month ceasefire by Muqtada al-Sadr's "Mahdi army" militia
announced on 31 August 2007 may not be extended after it expires in
February. The decision partly depends on the promise by the Iraqi government
security forces to curb the involvment in its ranks of the Mahdi's rivals, the
Badr militias; some at least of al-Sadr's influential advisers claim that this
has not happened. Much of the improvement in security claimed on behalf of the
increased presence of US forces in Iraq is actually the result of this
ceasefire. If the ceasefire does end, and if the level of Sunni insurgent actions against those regarded as collaborators is
sustained, then the possibility of a significant US withdrawal will dissolve.

In a sense, however, the overall strategic
environment in Iraq suggests that a massive and sustained US military presence
will be required in any circumstances. This is the view of
independent observers such as retired US general Barry McCaffrey, whose firsthand experience of the country
helps underpin a deserved reputation for accuracy in his assessment of the
progress of the Iraq war. In his view "an active counter-insurgency
campaign in Iraq could probably succeed in the coming decade with 25 US Combat
Brigade Teams" (this would represent more than half the army's available
combat troops). Such a commitment, which would require large numbers of
soldiers in supporting roles, would imply a long-term occupation of Iraq by
over 150,000 US soldiers (see Mark Perry, "US Military Breaks Ranks", Asia
Times, 24 January).

The
imperial scale

Whether such forces can actually be maintained
is a moot point, but it comes with the clear intention to establish what is
best described as a long-term US protectorate in Iraq. The US officials
currently negotiating agreements with the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki
are charged with seeking a quite extraordinary degree of influence and control.
This is already apparent in the building of the world's largest embassy in Baghdad; what is less noted is that
Washington is pursuing a strategy based on rules set down by Paul Bremer's
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) early in the second year of the US occupation
(see "America plans Iraqi escalation" [1 July 2004], and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
& Walter Pincus, "U.S. Edicts Curb Power of Iraq's
Leadership", Washington Post [27 June 2004]).

Perhaps the clearest indicator of where power
in Iraq is intended to lie is the attempt to impose or extend wide-ranging
exemptions for non-Iraqis from Iraqi laws. The more than 150,000 American
soldiers in Iraq are already exempt, as are a core of around 13,000 private-security contractors working there for the US defence
department; the aim now is to award the same extra-legal status to 154,000
civilian contractors also working for the Pentagon. This would take the total
personnel under US auspices who would have immunity from any
infraction under the Iraqi legal system to nearly a third of a million people
(see Thom Shanker & Steven Lee Myers, "U.S. to seek broad powers in
Iraq as UN mandate expires", International Herald Tribune, 25 January
2008).

The need to guarantee the security of a
protectorate on the scale envisaged - and, more immediately, to avoid attacks
on US ground-patrols - is already being met by a second and largely hidden
military surge. This one is airborne, and involves the expansion of US
air-power in Iraq far beyond even the intensive pounding of insurgent-held
areas around Baghdad. Among its features is the assignment of a squadron of
A-10 ground-attack aircraft to al-Asad airbase and an additional squadron of
F-16C strike aircraft to Balad air-base (see Tom Engelhardt, "Bombs away over Iraq: Who cares?", Asia
Times, 31 January 2008).

In an echo of the Baghdad embassy, Balad has grown to become the largest US air-base anywhere in the world: a
fifteen-square-mile mini-city with its own bus routes, fast-food outlets, two
supermarkets and accommodation for 40,000 military personnel and contractors.
The base - from which up to 550 air operations each day are conducted - is a
permanent construction site; the latest addition is a $30-million
command-and-control system that will integrate air-traffic management across the country as a whole.

In sum, the United States plan for Iraq is to
establish a series of tight political mechanisms of control deriving from the
original CPA-era agreements; a huge embassy-based structure in Baghdad to oversee and maintain these; immunity for over 300,000
foreign personnel; and continuing, direct authority over and access to Iraqi
detainees. The entire operation is to be secured by the US military and its
private contractors, increasingly protected by the use of air power.

This ambitious project is hardly consistent
with the idea - still the official line propagated by Washington, and
uncritically recycled by much of the establishment media - that the US's
political objective is to bolster the independent governance of Iraq by the
Iraqis themselves. Indeed, it goes further than the considerable power exerted
by the United States in several central American countries in the early 20th
century; its sheer grandeur might better be compared to some of the French or
British colonial-era protectorates. In contemporary terms, it comes close to
the establishment of a fully-fledged American colony in the heart of the Arab
and Islamic world. Whether or not the George W Bush administration and its
supporters realise it, the implications of that - for Iraq itself and for the
whole region - are set to match even what has happened over the last five
years.